Gary Becker, an economist, and Richard Posner, a federal judge, co-wrote this blog on economics, law, and public policy.
HN commenters recommend it as an excellent read, citing Posner's post on how patents differ for pharmaceuticals and software, and regret its end after Becker's death.
Good essay, but one small nitpick:
The problems with education are well-documented—teachers make far too little, it’s too
difficult to fire bad teachers, some cultures don’t value education, etc. Many of these
are easy to fix—pay teachers a lot more in exchange for a change in the tenure rules, for
example—and some issues (like cultural ones) are probably going to be very difficult to fix.
As another HN'er has pointed out, teacher pay or funding is absolutely not the issue. Per rayiner:
Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-and-the-role-of-schools-in-student-performance-on-standardized-testsposner.html
More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html?m=1
The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.
> Sometimes the government people ask “Would you ever move YC out of the US?” with nervous laughter? I really like it here and I sure hope we don’t, but never say never.
Hah. :) No you won't. Or, not that you won't, rather, it seems beneath you guys…
> Perhaps the United States is already doing enough.
Long-term it's absolutely not enough. The fundamental socioeconomic feature of 21st century will be the competition between the US system and China's massive population for global economic dominance.
The US population is ~300 million, China's is ~1.2 billion, 4x our size. For every engineer, scientist, genius, etc in the US, there are ~4 in China. Over the long term the US has no hope whatsoever of competing against that without significant structural changes.
Those structural changes include fixing our educational system, fighting tooth and nail for skilled immigrants, offering them better incentives to stay rather than return home to fast growing developing economies to make their fortunes, fixing the broken financial and patent/IP systems, etc.
Judge Posner sums up our shortfalls well in a recent blog post [1]. The US system will need to be operating at an order of magnitude greater efficiency than it currently is to have any hope of overcoming China's massive numbers advantage. Immigration is one of the few crucial advantages the US can exploit in that competition, but right now we're shooting ourselves in the foot so hard there we're blowing our leg off.
1. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html
One thing that Japanese companies have down is how they plan for their employees' retirements. I remember learning about their system in grad school and thinking I need to move to Japan! But it's been awhile, and I'd forgotten some of the details about how they do it.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/06/later_retiremen.html
Specifically: The Japanese system where employees past age 60 sometimes work for lower pay at the same company that had employed them would not be possible in the United States and some other countries because of legislation that prohibits alleged discrimination against older workers. The combination of legislation that prevents companies from lowering the earnings of older employees, and of legislation that prevents mandatory retirement in some occupations, creates a major rigidity in the market for older workers.
Brilliant. Build a system that rewards workers with retirement, yet subtly place incentives to encourage them to keep working (less). Albeit, they are also working for less $, but at this point, the holistic benefits of having employment probably outweigh the dollar amount.
When it comes to sports I always say that I’d rather have exciting sports than fair sports, and I’d rather have fair sports than clean sports. I’m a fan of pro-cycling, so doping news is in my life a lot. My favorite comments on intelligence doping come from the Becker-Posner blog:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/intelligence_do.html
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/comment_on_inte.html
I especially like Posner’s closing paragraph:
Of course the naturally gifted will object to any "artificial" enhancements that enable others to compete with them. But it is not obvious why their objections should be given weight from a public policy standpoint. It is not as if allowing such enhancements would be likely to discourage the naturally gifted from developing and using their gifts (it might have the opposite effect, by creating greater competition for them), let alone discouraging bright people from seeking out other people to marry and produce children by.
An excellent quote from Posner:
"The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals." [1]
[1] http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/06/capitalismposner.html
This opinion is both extraordinary and extremely significant. Richard Posner is probably the most prolific legal intellectual not on the supreme court. He co-writes, along with Gary Becker (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) this excellent blog http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Posner is the author of the 4th most cited Law Review article in the field of intellectual property law[1]. Most telling of all is this statistic: "As of 2000, Judge Posner was the most often-cited legal scholar of all time with 7,981 citations, nearly 50 percent more than anyone else" [2]. He retains that position in 2012.
[1] - William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, 18 J. Legal Stud. 325 (1989).
[2] Fred Schapiro & Michelle Pearse, The Most Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review 2012.